2019 Arctic Melt Drama

The Arctic Sea Ice Forum is abuzz. The sea ice as a whole is rotating clockwise and it's lifted away from Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Greenland with big cracks. Plus there's currently high pressure over the Arctic so there will be clear skies allowing sunshine through. Quote from Frivolousz21

For those who are not aware:

Meteorology speaking this setup is essentially the Holy Grail of having a record-setting Arctic sea of sea ice is sprawling upper level atmospheric ridges of high pressure that exist from top down.

This is the path to dry sinking air and wall to wall sunny skies.

We have never had a May 20-30th GARGANTUAN RIDGE that preconditioned the ice for huge June and July loses.

Replies to This Discussion

All forecasts are for another week of ideal conditions for ice loss . Either the winds or the temperatures would be enough to deepen the threat of accelerated melt .. but both at this time of year .. I have not seen before. Never has the ice been more mobile .. every change in wind direction , even locally , causes a change in ice movement .. and a warm welcome awaits in Barnetz , Fram and Nare's for much or it . This is a very different year to last .. if the weather continues to suit export and melt we will be re-writing the records .. b.c.

Wind-driven ice motion has been extraordinary this freeze/melt season. By translocating thicker, older ice into zones that will melt out later in the summer, or exporting ice altogether out of the basin via the Fram, Nares and Svalbard-FJL chain plus blocking Kara Sea ice on the import side, wind-driven ice motion may challenge conventional bottom and top melt this year as the leading ice volume loss mechanism. [emphasis mine]

This whole season is really starting to look very bad. Ice is just pouring down the Nares Strait, the whole pack is rotating like it sometimes does right at the end of the melt season, and we are just now entering the peak six weeks of northern hemisphere insolation. Unless something unexpected shows up to save things, we are in for a wild ride these next six weeks.

A large surface high pressure system has set up shop over the North Pole and is predicted to stay there and intensify over the next ten days. This will bring clear skies, warm temperatures, and near-record and possibly record melting of Arctic sea ice. Over the next ten days, temperatures are predicted to be near or just above freezing over much of the Arctic Ocean--about 2 - 5°C above average--according to the University of Maine’sClimate Reanalyzer.

The upcoming weather pattern is capable of pushing the sea ice to record-low extent by mid-June.

The latest GFS model forecast suggests that the Arctic high will drift to a location a few hundred miles north of Alaska by mid-June and remain strong. This position and strength is characteristic of the Arctic dipole anomaly, which features unusually high pressure over the Arctic Ocean north of North America and unusually low pressure over northeastern Eurasia. This pattern brings in warm southerly winds along the shores of the East Siberian and Chukchi seas, which favors strong ice melt in these sectors and pushes the ice away from the coast, leaving open water. The pressure pattern also causes loss of Arctic sea ice due to winds that transport of ice out of the Arctic Ocean and into the North Atlantic through Fram Strait, to the east of Greenland. [emphasis mine]

But just one event does not a record melting season make. What does make a melting season, is melting momentum.

…it's going to take some really cold and cloudy weather during July and August to keep 2019 out of the top 3. It happened in 2017 and 2018, when things weren't looking all that great either, but less bad than now. It happened in 2015 and 2016 as well.

In recent years, the Arctic has dodged bullets and cannonballs. It looks like this year, it may have to dodge a nuclear bomb.”

Here's ajouis' view of where the Arctic is heading this melting season:

I am seeing some people here speculating that this season might not be a record breaker, and indeed cab [Central Arctic Basin] area, the one most important to determine the minimum is lagging very far behind other record years. However, volume and extent are at record low and area is close behind. In addition … the cab volume is at an all time low, meaning there has been extreme thinning throughout that region. This is the worst preconditioning possible if any notable event arise or melting momentum continues.

Either we get lucky with an extremely cold august and we dodge the bullet and end up with a relatively high minimum, or, more likely, insolation remains high with severe storms, and we end up with an extremely diminished cab and a new record low by quite a mile. I’d be betting on the second option. [paragraph break added]

DrTskoul: … how much warmer 2019 was just compared to 2012. 1-3 degrees warmer over most of the arctic compared to the previous minimum year,

Bbr2314: … the cold is now increasingly becoming focused in the grain-growing regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The crop situation this year across much of the Midwest is now dire. Yields will be double-digit %s below normal.

FishOutofWater: The ECMWF continues to forecast heat pumping out of the Pacific into the Arctic. The latest model run shows typhoon heat and water vapor being pulled into troughs that wave break into the Arctic, creating a massive Arctic heat anomaly. It's nuts. This has been the most persistent ridging/subsidence pattern of any Arctic summer …

Alphabet Hotel: [replying to Wildcatter: Is something up with the oscillation? Looks like it's getting a bit confused. ] I think we may be seeing the kind of chaotic behavior that occurs when a system is transitioning to a new state. There's really no telling what might happen, and all our past history will not be useful if that's what this is.

The 2019 drama has mostly passed. Since there are no indications that a huge Arctic cyclone will appear to beat up the ice, as happened in 2012, second lowest extent is in the cards. Insolation (sunshine) is about gone for the central Arctic basin.